Why are the faxes I send getting scrunched?
We have gone from an in-house fax server to a cloud etherFAX service. Our faxes now traverse our LAN, over the public internet, to their service. They then fax out to our physicians. It took some troubleshooting to get it working properly, but it works well now and scales very nicely. Some doctors offices are getting their faxes all compressed with scrunched together output from their fax machines or inbound faxes. It is only from us that the problem is occurring; they receive other faxes fine. I believe they have PRI lines inbound, they are private offices not hooked up to our systems at all.
So, first of all, you say that this problem is only happening with faxes from you. That means that the issue definitely could be happening on your end. I’ve heard of, for example, the aspect ratio of images getting messed up when using certain programs. If this was your problem, the scrunched faxes would look like you made a picture much shorter than it should have been, like a funhouse mirror. Depending on what you’re sending and how it reaches and leaves the EtherFAX fax board, this could potentially be the problem.
If you’ve ruled out a problem on your end, the issue could be the most common cause of scrunched faxes: the modem flow control. This kind of scrunching doesn’t look like a picture that’s been smashed together; it usually looks like a fax that has been folded like a fan so that bands of the fax are on top of one another.
If the issue is the modem flow control, your tech people can try a couple of things: They can change the setting of the modem or the init-string. What it boils down to, though, is that one way or another they will have to turn flow control on. How they do that is a matter of how they manage their modem.
Do you have a question about faxing? Send me your fax question.
